How long does it take to sell a million iPads? Just 28 days, Apple — the Cupertino maker of Mac computers and “i” devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod) — revealed. “One million iPads in 28 days — that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted. “Demand continues to exceed supply, and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers.” Jobs’ announcement followed Apple’s debut three days earlier of iPads equipped with 3G wireless connections. Despite the iPad milestone, it wasn’t entirely a good day for Apple: According to a report in The New York Post that was confirmed by other news outlets, the company was facing scrutiny from federal antitrust regulators over its decision to ban the use of third-party technology — in particular, San Jose software maker Adobe Systems’ Flash video platform — by developers of “apps” for the iPad and iPhone.

Tuesday

It was the first of four wild days on Wall Street. Many observers blamed the turmoil on fears that debt problems in Greece could trigger economic problems throughout Europe, or even globally. (Or perhaps investors were just growing worried after several months of stock-market gains.) The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average (home to Silicon Valley tech titans Cisco Systems, Intel and Hewlett-Packard) dropped 2 percent, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index (closely watched here in tech-heavy Silicon Valley) fell 3 percent.

Wednesday

Mountain View Internet advertising juggernaut Google unveiled a new look and feel for its flagship search engine. First, the Google logo itself (originally designed in 1999 by co-founder Sergey Brin) got a little nip and tuck here and some bold coloring there. “We were trying to focus on a clean and simple and modern look,” Google’s Patrick Riley told a Merc reporter. “That’s what many of the changes on the results page were about.” As for the search results, Google added a navigation panel on the left side of the page, complete with colorful icons. “This new side panel highlights the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, explained on a blog post. For example, a search for “wind power” allows queries to be narrowed down to categories such as “News,” “Blogs,” “Images,” “Books” — or, at the top, “Everything.” “The ‘Everything’ option remains our essential search experience with different types of results integrated into the main results, but now you can also easily switch to just the particular type of results you are looking for,” Mayer wrote. Google also added a “Something Different” feature that offers related topics (such as, with our “wind power” search, “solar power”). “These changes are slight, keeping our page minimalist and whimsical, but make our overall look more modern,” Mayer noted.

Symantec, meanwhile, reported a $184 million profit for its most recent quarter, a turnaround from a $264 million loss a year earlier. Revenue jumped 4 percent to $1.53 billion. The results for the Cupertino maker of security and data storage software far exceeded Wall Street’s expectations “…

Thursday

“… sending Symantec shares 1.7 percent higher on an otherwise jolting day for the Dow and Nasdaq. (In fact, Symantec was Thursday’s only gainer among Silicon Valley’s big tech stocks.)

In a plunge so brief you would have missed it if you took an early lunch break, stocks dropped sharply — intensified by a monster wave of computerized selling — before partly recovering. About 11:45 a.m. here on the West Coast, the Dow plunged as low as 9,869.92, down more than 9 percent. The Nasdaq dropped as low as 2,185.75, also about a 9 percent dive. “I think the machines just took over,” Charlie Smith, chief investment officer of Fort Pitt Capital Group, told our friends at The Associated Press. “We’ve known that automated trading can run away from you, and I think that’s what we saw happen today.” (Needless to say, investigators were looking into the unusual trading.) After a roller-coaster ride of a day, the Dow closed down 3.2 percent, and the Nasdaq was 3.4 lower.

Friday

Silicon Valley tech stocks plunged yet again. By the end of the week, for example, Apple shares were down more than 13 percent from their peak. (Apple, though, dropped after the company was sued again by rival phone maker Nokia, which extended iPhone patent-infringement claims to the iPad.) Despite a Labor Department report showing U.S. employers added a stronger-than-expected 290,000 payroll jobs last month, the Dow dropped 1.3 percent, and the Nasdaq lost 2.3 percent. For the week, the Dow fell nearly 6 percent, and the Nasdaq plummeted nearly 8 percent.

Good week: Activision Blizzard.
It looks like “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” was a huge hit for the Santa Monica video game publisher. Combined with strong sales for “World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King,” Activision Blizzard pulled in a better-than-expected $1.3 billion in sales for its most recent quarter, up 33 percent from a year earlier. Profit more than doubled to $381 million.

Bad week: Nintendo.
Nintendo, the Japanese maker of the Wii video game player, reported its first yearly drop in earnings in six years. Profit for the year that ended March 31 fell 18 percent to $2.5 billion, according to The Associated Press. Sales dropped 22 percent to $15.4 billion. Nintendo cut prices on the Wii to compete better with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3.

Three women have told the New York Times that music mogul Russell Simmons raped them, the latest in a cascade of serious allegations of sexual misconduct against powerful men in entertainment, media, politics and elsewhere.